Newbie question. I understand the choice of the SPIonic font for the TextKit fora, since it's basically betacode (in my opinion, the second best standard for representing Classical Greek), but why not Unicode (the best standard)? After all, fonts are freely available, the character mapping is standard, keyboard mappings are whatever people set up for themselves, and Unicode is the way of the future. (Admittedly, my e-mail program does not yet support Unicode, but that's my problem.)

I also consider Unicode the way of the future. But the future isn't quite here yet. I'd guess in another 3-5 years it'll be reasonable to expect the majority of visitors to have not just unicode fonts but decent tools to allow them to read their email and - most difficult now - enter multi-language text in a reasonably friendly way. I'm reminded often of the comment by Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python that "everyone wants Unicode. Until they get it."

It's amazing how often this topic comes up, not only here, but from time to time on other classics mailing lists.